_Merovingian Rouen_
"Consurgit pater in filium, filius in patrem, frater in
fratrem, proximus in propinquum."
Literally not one stone remains in Rouen to which I can point you as a
witness of the tragedy in which the names of Fredegond and Brunhilda
will always live. Yet the part of their tragedy which was played in
Rouen must be told, if you are clearly to fashion for yourself that
web of many faded colours which is to be the background for the first
figures recognisable as flesh and blood, the northern pirates. It is a
story which points as clearly to the downfall of Merovingian society
and the coming of a new race, as ever any tale of Rome's decline and
fall pointed to the coming of the barbarians.
After the death of King Hlothair, the last man of the blood of the
great Hlodowig, or Clovis, whose Frankish warriors had driven the
Romans out of Gaul, and who himself became the "eldest son of the
Church," his kingdom had been divided among his four sons, of whom the
eldest died in possession of the lands of Bordeaux; and left his
treasure to be taken by the next brother, Gunthram, and his lands to
be divided among all three of the surviving heirs. Mutual suspicion
defeated its own ends, and the ridiculous principles on which the
division was made were the mainspring of nearly all the quarrelling
that followed. Sigebert, the youngest brother, reigned over Austrasia,
which stretched eastward from the north of Gaul through Germany
towards the Slavs and Saxons. Gunthram had the central land of Orléans
and Burgundy. Hilperik reigned north and westward of the Loire in
Neustria. But each of the three owned towns and lands in various parts
of France without regard to the broad lines of division which have
just been indicated. Of them all Hilperik, the King of Neustria, was
the most uxorious and effeminate. By his wife, Audowere, he had had
three sons, Hlodowig, Theodobert and Merowig, who was held at the font
of Rouen Cathedral by the Bishop Pretextatus. Among the royal waiting
women was a young and very beautiful Frank called Fredegond, on whom
the King had already cast a too-favourable eye; and the opportunity of
his absence on an expedition to the North was seized by the girl in a
way which showed at once the unscrupulous and subtle treachery which
was the keynote of her character. The Queen was brought to bed of her
fourth child, a daughter, while the King was still from home. By
Fredegond's suggestion, the infant was held at the font by Audowere
herself and christened Hildeswinda. Hlodowig at once took advantage of
the trap into which the innocent and unsuspecting mother had fallen.
As soon as he returned he sent away Audowere and her baby to a
monastery at Le Mans, on the pretext that it was illegal for the
godmother of his own daughter to be his wife. He then made Fredegond
his queen.
The conduct of the younger brother Sigebert was at once more dignified
and more politically secure. At Metz in 566 he married Brunhilda, the
younger daughter of Athanagild, King of the Goths, whose capital was
at Toledo, a woman whose courage, beauty, and resource, have remained
a byword in history and song. The splendour and success of this
alliance roused Hilperik's jealousy, and he lost no time in sending an
embassy to Spain asking the hand of Galeswintha, the elder sister of
his brother's wife. After much negotiation, the girl left the palace
of Toledo on her long march to the north. Her own presentiment of
coming evil was strengthened by the tears of her reluctant mother, who
could with difficulty be persuaded to leave the procession that
escorted the princess across the Pyrenees. By way of Narbonne,
Carcassonne, Poitiers, and Tours, Galeswintha moved slowly across
France towards her husband, with all her Goths and Franks behind her,
and a train of baggage waggons groaning beneath the treasures of her
dowry. She made her entry into Rouen on a towering car, set with
plates of glittering silver, and all the Neustrian warriors stood in a
great circle round her with drawn swords, crying aloud the oath of
their allegiance. Before them all, the King swore constancy and faith
to her, and on the morning following he publicly made present to her
of the five southern cities that were his wedding gift.
Fredegond had disappeared. In the general proscription of immorality
that had followed the embassy to Spain, she was swept away like the
rest, and she knew when to yield. Like the viper in the grass she lay
hidden, gathering up her venom for a more deadly blow. So harmless did
she seem that she was soon allowed to return to her former humble post
as one of the waiting women of the palace. It was not long before she
struck. The sensual and shallow nature of the King had soon wearied of
his new bride, whose chief charm was not, it would appear, her beauty.
A moment came when weariness became disgust. The sight of Fredegond
recalled his former passion, and the proud princess of the Goths soon
had the mortification of seeing the affections of her husband
transferred to her waiting woman. But this was not enough. A few days
afterwards Queen Galeswintha was found strangled in her bed, in 568.
Hilperik was not long in adding the dignity of queen to the position
of wife which he had already given to the triumphant Fredegond.
The sad young figure of this Spanish princess, brought up against her
will from sunnier courts into the midst of Merovingian brutality in
the dark palaces of Neustria, is one that affected many minds with
compassion for her fate. The story of the crystal lamp that hung above
her tomb in Rouen, which fell upon the marble pavement, yet was
neither broken nor extinguished, was but a poetical expression of the
universal pity.[2] In the heart of her sister Brunhilda pity flamed
rapidly into revenge. Sigebert was enlisted on the side of justice,
and Gunthram quickly followed him, with the object of making peace
between his brothers. The King of Neustria was condemned to forfeit
certain cities as punishment for the murder of his queen.
[Footnote 2: Gregory of Tours, H.F., iv. 28. "Post cuius obitum Deus
virtutem magnam ostendit. Lichinus enim ille, qui fune suspensus coram
sepulchrum eius ardebat, nullo tangente, disrupto fune, in pavimentum
conruit, et fugientem ante eam duriciam pavimenti, tanquam in aliquod
molle aelimentum discendit, atque medius est suffusus nec omnino
contritus."]
But the blood of Galeswintha still cried out for vengeance from the
ground, and the horrible series of murders that filled the century
began with Hilperik's unwarranted aggressions on the territory of his
brother Sigebert. Long months passed in pillage, in ineffectual
attempts at reconciliation, in perpetual reprisals. At last Brunhilda
rose and insisted that her husband should make an end with the
murderer of her sister. So Sigebert and his army moved forward to a
combined attack and chased Hilperik to the walls of Paris. Thither,
when Fredegond and her husband had fled to Rouen and then to Tournai,
Brunhilda came southwards to meet the conqueror who soon marched north
again to be crowned at Vitry, leaving his wife behind to guard the
capital in triumph. Now came Fredegond's opportunity. For when
Hilperik was besieged by Sigebert in the city of Tournai and sore
pressed, Fredegond saw her enemy delivered into her hand. "La femme,"
say the chronicles of St. Denis (III. 3 and 4) "pensa de la besogne là
où le sens de son seigneur faillait, qui selon la coutume de femme,
moult plus est de grand engieng à malfaire que n'est homme." By some
diabolical trick of fascination she persuaded a pair of assassins to
penetrate into Sigebert's camp, armed with a "scramasax" she had
herself provided. They murdered him as he sat at table, and were
instantly cut to pieces by the courtiers.[3] Fredegond always managed
to get inconvenient witnesses out of the way. Hilperik at once took
advantage of the confusion to march on Paris, and the horror of
Brunhilda may be imagined as she realised that the murderer of her
husband and of her sister was approaching the city in which the widow
and her three orphans were defenceless. Her son (afterwards the second
Hildebert), was then but five years old, and by the help of Gundobald
she was able to contrive his escape, lowering him in a basket through
an opening in the city walls.
[Footnote 3: Gregory of Tours, _Ib._ 51. "Tunc duo pueri cum cultris
validis, quos vulgo scramasaxos vocant, infectis veneno, maleficati a
Fredegundae Regina, cum aliam causam suggerere simularent, utraque ei
latera feriunt."]
Then began another act in this dark drama, which ended very
differently to the expectations of Fredegond. For with his father had
come young Merowig to Paris, and whether from fascinations that had
some deep ulterior design, or whether as is more probable from the
natural attraction felt by the young warrior for a lovely princess in
distress, Merowig fell hopelessly in love with the fair Brunhilda, who
was but twenty-eight and could have been very little older than her
second husband. He saw, however, the danger of prematurely confessing
his passion, and quietly went off on a foraging expedition to Berri
and Touraine at the bidding of his father. But, no doubt, he was aware
before starting of Hilperik's intention to send Brunhilda to Rouen;
for it was not long before he marched northwards (after a visit to his
mother Audowere in her prison at Le Mans),[4] and came to Rouen
himself. The meeting cannot have been a surprise to the daughter of
the Spanish Goths, and whatever may have been her intentions, she
proved so willing to console herself that a very short time elapsed
before she was the wife of Merowig. Strangely enough the Bishop of
Rouen at the time was the same Pretextatus who had been Merowig's
godfather at his baptism. "Proprium mihi," he says (in the history of
Gregory of Tours) "esse videbatur, quod filio meo Merovecho erat, quem
de lavacro regeneratione excepi." This kindly and somewhat weak
prelate, whose natural sympathies seem invariably to have proved too
strong for his political prudence, was prevailed upon to perform the
ceremony of marrying to Merowig the widow of his father's murdered
brother. But it was not merely canonical law, or even certain
sentimental precepts, that were offended by a union that was later on
to cost its celebrant his life. The suspicions of Hilperik were
instantly aroused. Brunhilda's young son had already been accepted as
their King by the Austrasian warriors at Metz. Now Brunhilda herself
had taken what was evidently the second step in a deep-laid plot to
reassert her own superiority and ruin Neustria. It can have scarcely
needed the hatred of Fredegond, both for her natural rival and for the
son of Audowere, to urge Hilperik to speedy action. He hastened to
Rouen with such swiftness that the newly-married pair were entirely
taken by surprise in the first few months of their new happiness. They
fled for sanctuary to the little wooden church of St. Martin, whose
timbers rested on the very ramparts of the town. No entreaties nor
cajoleries at first availed to make them leave their refuge. At last,
they agreed to come out if the King would swear not to separate them.
His oath was a crafty one as it is given by Gregory of Tours: "Si,
inquit, voluntas Dei fuerit, ipse has separare non conaretur," and, of
course, the "will of God" happened to be the wish of Hilperik, and
they were safely separated as soon as possible. For after two or three
days of feasting and apparent reconciliation he hurried off with the
unwilling bridegroom in his train, and left Brunhilda under a strict
guard at Rouen.
[Footnote 4: But "Ipse vero, _simulans_ ad matrem suam ire velle,"
says Gregory (H.F. V. 2), "Rothomago petiit et ibi Brunechildae
reginae conjungitur...."]
The very first incident that followed this unhappy marriage was the
siege of Soissons by the men of Neustria, and in this coincidence the
King saw further confirmation of the plots of Brunhilda in which she
had so nearly secured the assistance of Merowig against Fredegond and
his father. He at once ordered his miserable son, whose intellect was
incapable of ambitious schemes, and whose only fault had been an
unconsidered passion, to be stripped of his arms, and to have the long
hair cut from his head that was a mark of royal blood. The later
adventures of the wretched Merowig, an exile and an outlaw, hunted
through his father's kingdom, are too intricate to follow. After a
long imprisonment in the sanctuary of Tours Cathedral, he escaped only
to be murdered by the emissaries of the implacable Fredegond in a
farmhouse north of Arras. Meanwhile his wife, Brunhilda, had long ago
been set free to go from Rouen to Austrasia. She was safer across the
border, while the follies of another Merowig might make her dangerous.
Her flight, at this unexpected opportunity of freedom, was so rapid
that she left the greater part of her baggage and treasure with the
Bishop of Rouen, who was once more unwise enough to compromise himself
in order to be of service to his godchild's wife. For Pretextatus not
only supplied Merowig with money in his various efforts to escape, but
was so careless in his demands upon the friendship of the surrounding
nobles, and in scattering bribes to gain them over, that his
treasonable practices soon came to the ears of Hilperik. That
avaricious and perpetually needy ruler was not long in securing the
remainder of the treasure of which tidings had so opportunely reached
him, and he then immediately summoned Pretextatus to answer before a
solemn ecclesiastical council in Paris, as to his relations with
Brunhilda, and his disposition of the money she had left with him. The
celebrated trial that followed, of which Gregory of Tours was at once
the historian and the noblest figure, was ended by the brutal
interference of Fredegond, who could not be patient with the law's
delays, and forced the Bishop of Rouen to fly for refuge to the island
of Jersey where he lived in exile for some years, until the time
arrived for Fredegond's full vengeance to be consummated.
That time was marked, as was every crisis in the blood-stained career
of Fredegond, by a murder. The weak and effeminate King himself fell a
victim, and was slain (in 584) by unknown assassins as he was out
hunting. In the confusion and lawlessness that ensued, Pretextatus
returned from exile to Rouen, and Fredegond, who had placed herself
under the protection of Gunthram, was sent to Rueil, a town in the
domain of Rouen, near the meeting of the Eûre and Seine. Leaving for
awhile in peace the old ecclesiastic who had had the insolence to come
back to the dignities from which she had driven him, Fredegond turned
at once to plot the destruction of her lifelong enemy, Brunhilda, who
was now in a position of far greater security and honour than herself.
But her emissary was obliged to return unsuccessful, and had his feet
and hands cut off for his pains. A second attempt upon both mother and
son failed equally, and then Fredegond, balked of her higher prey,
took the victim that was nearest, and went out from Rueil to Rouen. It
was not long before the quarrel that she sought was occasioned by the
bishop, who seems to have added to his usual unwisdom a courage born
of the hardships of seven years of exile. Answering a taunt flung at
him by the deposed queen, he bitterly drew the contrast between their
present positions, and their former relation to each other, and bade
Fredegond look to the salvation of her soul and the education of her
son, and leave the wickedness that had stained so many years of her
life with blood.
She left him on the instant and without a word, "felle fervens," says
Gregory; and indeed it was not long before her vengeance broke out in
the usual way. As the bishop knelt in prayer soon afterwards before
the altar of the Cathedral, her assassin drove his knife beneath his
armpit, and Pretextatus was carried bleeding mortally to his chamber.
Thither came the queen to gloat over her latest victim, begging him to
say whose hand it was had done the deed, that so due punishment might
be at once exacted. But he knew well who was the real murderess. "Quis
haec fecit," replied the dying prelate, "nisi qui reges interemit, qui
sepius sanguinem innocentium effudit, qui diversa in hoc regno mala
commisit?"
The whole town was cast into distress and bitter mourning by this
pitiless assassination, and Fredegond had accomplished her will with
so much cunning that the crime could with the greatest difficulty be
legally traced to its true origin. For she had taken advantage of the
ecclesiastical jealousy which unfortunately existed side by side with
the popular reverence and love. Melantius, who had for seven years
enjoyed the privileges of office and dispensed his favours in the
bishopric, had seen himself deposed with very mingled feelings by the
exile from Jersey. His own nominees were doubtless not unwilling to
emphasise his grievance, and Fredegond found in his disappointed
ambition a soil only too ready to receive the poisonous seed she was
so anxious to implant. Among the inferior clergy was an archdeacon
whose hatred of Pretextatus was as great, and more reckless in its
expression. By him a slave was easily discovered ready to commit this
or any other crime on the promise of freedom for himself and his
family. A guarantee of favours to come was provided in some ready
money paid beforehand, and the blow was struck while Pretextatus
prayed. Romans and Franks alike were horrified at the dastardly
outrage. The former could scarcely act outside the city walls, but the
Franks felt more secure in the ancient privileges of their race, and
some of their nobles at once gave public expression to the hatred felt
by every citizen for the instigator of the crime. Led by one of their
own chiefs, a deputation of these Frankish nobles rode up to
Fredegond's palace at Rueil. They delivered a message to the effect
that justice should be done, and that the murderess must at last put a
term to all her crimes. Her reply was even more rapid and fearless
than usual. She handed the speaker a cup of honeyed wine, after the
custom of his country; he drank the poison, and fell dead upon the
spot.
A kind of panic fell upon his comrades, and extended even to the town
of Rouen itself. Like some monstrous incarnation of evil, Fredegond
seemed to have settled near their city, followed by a trail of death.
Her very breath, it was imagined, exhaled the poisons of the sorcery
and witchcraft that accompanied and rendered possible her countless
assassinations. She seemed beyond the pale of human interference, and
invested with some infernal omnipotence that baffled all pursuit or
vengeance. Every church in Rouen closed its doors, for the head of
their Church lay foully murdered, and his murderer was not yet
punished. Leudowald of Bayeux took over the sacred office in the
interval of consternation that ensued, before another successor could
be appointed, and he insisted that not another Mass should be
celebrated throughout the diocese until the criminal had been brought
to justice. Night and day he had to pay the penalty for his boldness
by being forced to keep careful guard against the hired bravos of his
unscrupulous enemy, who was now fairly started in a career of
bloodshed, that she would never end until her vengeance was complete.
At last she wore out his courage and his strength alike, and the
inquiry gradually faded away before the persistent and sinister
vindictiveness of the royal witch at Rueil. She soon was strong enough
to put her creature Melantius back in his episcopal chair, and he was
content to officiate upon the very stones that were still stained with
the innocent blood of Pretextatus.
One more proof of the absolute mastery her intrigues had given her was
afforded by Fredegond's next action. Its heartless cynicism was but a
natural consequence of so much previous guilt. For she deliberately
summoned before her the slave whose assassin's knife she had bought,
reproached him openly with his hideous crime, and handed him over to
the dead bishop's relations. Under torture this miserable wretch
confessed the full details of the murder, the names of his
accomplices, and the guilt of Fredegond. The nephew of Pretextatus,
apparently aware that he would never get satisfaction on the
principals, leapt upon the prey that had so contemptuously been flung
to him, and cut the slave to pieces with his sword. And this was the
sole reparation that was ever given for the murder of the bishop. But
the people never forgot the Pretextatus who lived for centuries in
their memory as a martyred saint. His terrible fate has more than
atoned, in their eyes, for the impolitic events of his earlier life,
or his unwise affection for the unfortunate prince he had baptised.
[Illustration: THE ARMS OF ROUEN]
With this last crime that part of the Merovingian tragedy with which
Rouen is connected comes to a close. Nor have I space here to follow
out the actors to the curtain's fall. In other pages their various
fortunes and their dark calamities may be followed to a conclusion.
The next chapter in the history of the town is that of the Northmen,
and of the founding of that mighty dynasty which was to spread its
rule across the Channel, and to gather the towns of England under the
same sceptre that swayed the citizens of Rouen. But before the coming
of the Northmen, there are a few more slight facts that I must
chronicle if only to explain the desert and the ruins that alone were
Rouen when the first pirate galley swept up to the quay and anchored
close to where the western door of the Cathedral now looks out across
the Parvis.
The monk Fridegode relates that it was in 533 that the first stones of
what was afterwards to be the famous Abbey of St. Ouen[5] were laid by
the first Hlothair. Others say that a church founded nearly two
centuries before was restored by the son of Hlotild the holy Queen
and dedicated first to the Holy Apostles, and then to St. Peter and
St. Paul. Its name was changed to the one it bears now in 686 when the
body of St. Ouen was moved there on Ascension Day three years after
his death. But not a trace of the original church remains, and most
probably it was built almost entirely of wood, like that shrine of St.
Martin in which Brunhilda and her young husband fled for sanctuary in
about the year 580. In this same century we first hear too of that
legendary Kingdom of Yvetôt, whose lord was freed from all service to
the Royal House of France by the penitence of King Hlothair. Its
history is chiefly confined to the airy fantasies of poets, and is
completely justified of its existence by Beranger's verses:
"Il était un roi d'Yvetôt
Peu connu dans l'histoire
Se levant tard se couchant tôt
Dormant fort bien sans gloire
Et couronné par Jeanneton
D'un simple bonnet de coton,"
which may very well serve as the epitome and epitaph of a lazy
independence that needed no more serious chronicler.[6]
[Footnote 5: "In manu gothica," he says, with a phrase that was to
produce a very pretty quarrel later on.]
[Footnote 6: This jovial monarch is mentioned in a legal decree of
1392. He retires into obscurity during the English Occupation, and is
restored, curiously enough, by the sombre Louis XI. in 1461, and freed
from all taxes and subsidies. At the entry of Charles VIII. in 1485
(see Chap. X.) he makes a very appropriate appearance. In 1543
François Premier mentions a "Reine d'Yvetôt." In 1610 Martin du
Bellay, Sieur de Langey and Lieutenant General of Normandy, was hailed
as "Mon petit roi d'Yvetôt" by Henri Quatre at the coronation of Marie
de Médicis. In 1783 the last "documentary" evidence occurs in the
inscription on two boundary-stones: "Franchise de la Principauté
d'Yvetôt."]
[Illustration: CHAPELLE DE LA FIERTE DE ST. ROMAIN IN THE PLACE DE LA
HAUTE VIELLE TOUR]
Early in the next century occurs the name of a saint who was destined
to be famous in the story of the town from its earliest days of civic
life until the chaos of the Revolution, in which the old order fell to
pieces and carried so many picturesque and harmless ceremonies into
the limbo where it swept away the ancient abuses of despotic monarchy.
For with the name of St. Romain, who enlarged St. Mellon's primitive
"cathedral" even more than St. Victrice had done, is connected one of
the most extraordinary privileges that any ecclesiastical body ever
possessed. The Chapter of the Cathedral of Rouen every Ascension Day
were allowed by the "Privilège de Saint Romain" to release a prisoner
condemned to death, who was then made to carry the holy relics of the
saint upon his shoulders in a great procession. The list of the
prisoners who bore the "Fierte Saint Romain"[7] extends from 1210 to
1790, the chapel where the ceremony was performed still stands in the
Place de la Haute Vieille Tour, and the manuscripts in which the
released prisoners' names with their accomplices and crimes are
recorded, furnish some of the most interesting and practically
unknown details of the intimate life of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. I shall have occasion to refer to them so fully later on
that I must for the present confine myself merely to abolishing a
myth, and laying some slight foundation for the facts that are to
follow--facts so astonishing and so authentic that they need no aid
from legend or romance.
[Footnote 7: Evidently "feretrum," _cf._ "La fiertre de Saint Thomas,"
Froissart, xii. 9.]
Yet the miracle that is related to-day about St. Romain is so
persistent and so widely spread, that it must be told, if only to
explain the many allusions contained in picture, in carving, and in
song,[8] throughout the tale of Rouen, and in the very stones and
windows of her most sacred buildings. The story is but another variant
of our own St. George, of St. Martha and the Tarasque in Provence, of
many others in almost every country. It is but one more
personification of that struggle of Good against Evil, Light against
Darkness, Truth against Error, Civilisation against Barbarism, which
is as old as the book of Genesis and as the history of the world. It
has been represented by Apollo and the python, by Anubis and the
serpent, by the Grand'gueule of Poitiers, by the dragons of Louvain
and of St. Marcel. The general truth was appropriated by each
particular locality until every church and town had its peculiar
monster slain by its especial saint. Thus at Bordeaux there was St.
Martial, thus Metz had St. Clément, Asti and Venice had their guardian
saints, Bayeux had St. Vigor, Rouen had St. Romain. The emblem of
eternal strife had become a universal allegory acceptable in every
place and in all centuries, and so commonly believed, that until some
poignant necessity arose for its assertion, it was never--as we shall
see--mentioned even by those historians of the life of St. Romain, who
might more especially be expected to know the details of his life.
[Footnote 8: He is carved on a façade in the Musée des Antiquités, for
instance, and painted in a window of the Church of St. Godard, to take
only two examples of his constant occurrence in the civil and
religious life of the people.]
For St. Romain, so the fable runs, delivered Rouen from an immense and
voracious monster, called the "Gargouille," who dwelt in the morasses
and reed-beds of the river, and devoured the inhabitants of the
town.[9] The wily saint employed a condemned criminal as a bait, lured
the dragon from its den, then made the sign of the cross over it, and
dragged it, unresisting, by his holy stole into the town, "où elle fut
arse et bruslez." To commemorate this deliverance in 626, continues
the legend, the good King Dagobert (or was it Hlothair?) at the
saint's request, allowed the Cathedral to release a prisoner every
year upon Ascension Day, as the saint had released the prisoner who
had assisted in the destruction of the "Gargouille."
[Footnote 9: Not only did it eat men, women, and children, say the old
chronicles, but "ne pardonnait même pas aux vaisseaux et navires!"]
All this is a very pretty example of a holy hypothesis constructed to
explain facts that arose in a very different manner; and though it is
no pleasant task to undermine a picturesque belief, yet the chain of
events which led to its universal acceptance are too remarkable to be
left without a firm historical basis, or at any rate a suggestion more
in accordance with the science of dates than that which was related by
the Church throughout so many centuries. For there is no disputing
that if the "miracle" had in actual fact occurred, some mention would
have been made of it after the death of St. Romain in 638, or at any
rate after 686, when the historians had the whole life of St. Ouen and
his times to describe. Yet neither St. Ouen himself nor Dudo of St.
Quentin in the tenth century, nor William of Jumièges, nor Orderic
Vital, nor Anselm, Abbot of Bec, in the eleventh, say a word about
it; and these are all most respectable and painstaking authorities. In
1108, when an assembly was held by William the Conqueror at
Lillebonne, with the express object of regulating privileges, not a
word was said by the Archbishop of Rouen there present about the most
extraordinary privilege enjoyed by his chapter. It is only at the
beginning of the thirteenth century that the inevitable quarrels
between the civil and ecclesiastical powers over a criminal claimed by
both can first be traced; and it may be safely argued that while the
privilege was not questioned it did not exist. It is as late as 1394
that the first mention of the famous "Gargouille" itself occurs in any
reputable document. It was not till a twenty-second of May 1425, that
Henry, King of France and England, did command the Bishop of Bayeux
and Raoul le Sage to inquire into the "usage et coutume d'exercer le
privilège de Saint Romain"; for the good reason that in this year the
chapter desired to release, by the exercise of their privilege, one
Geoffroy Cordeboeuf, who had slain an Englishman. In 1485, one
Étienne Tuvache, was summoned to uphold the privilege before the "Lit
de Justice" of Charles VIII. on the 27th of April; and in 1512 we find
the definite confirmation of the privilege by Louis XII.; and even yet
there are only a few confused and vague rumours of the "Gargouille"
and its saintly conqueror.
There are, therefore, far more numerous and more authentic traces of
the privilege than of the miracle; the effect is undoubted; it remains
to conjecture its prime cause; and as I shall show at greater length
in its right place, there is every reason to believe that the origin
of the privilege was one of the great Mystery Plays of the Ascension,
and that it was first exercised between 1135 and 1145. As the custom
grew into a privilege, and the privilege crystallised into a right,
ecclesiastical advocates were never at a loss to bring divine
authority to their aid in their championship of the chapter's powers;
the "Gargouille," in fact, was "created" after the "privilège" had
become established; and for us the chief merit of the tale lies in the
fact that it preserves the national memory of St. Romain's firm stand
against the old dragon of idolatry and paganism, whose last remnants
were swept out of Normandy by his firm and militant Christianity.[10]
[Footnote 10: He certainly pulled down the Amphitheatre, and destroyed
the Temple of Venus, and the loss of both of these was likely to be
well remembered for some time by the inhabitants. It is suggested that
the Temple of Adonis fell at the bidding of the same bold reformer to
make way for the first church of St. Paul beneath the heights of St.
Catherine.]
This is an age of great churchmen. While the Roman Empire lasted, the
Church had been dependent and submissive to the Emperors. When the
Franks arrived her attitude was changed, for to these barbarous and
ungodly strangers she stood as a beneficent superior, and a steadfast
shield over the Gallo-Roman people. So it was that the bishops became
the protectors of towns, the counsellors of kings, the owners of large
and rich tracts of land, the sole possessors of knowledge and of
letters in an age of darkest brutality and ignorance. With the names
of St. Ouen and St. Romain in Normandy at this time are bound up those
of St. Philibert, St. Saëns, and St. Herbland, under whose protection
was one of the oldest parishes of Rouen. His church stood until quite
modern years in the Parvis of the Cathedral at the end of the Rue de
la Grosse Horloge. On various islands in the stream, for the very soil
of Rouen at this time was as uncertain as its chronicles, were built
the chapels to St. Clément and St. Eloi, and other saints. The
boundaries of the Frankish settlement, described in terms of modern
street-geography, were, roughly, along the Rue des Fossés Louis VIII.
from Pont de Robec to the Poterne, thence by the Marché Neuf, now
Place Verdrel, along the Palais, through the Rue Massacre to the Rue
aux Ours. From there the line passed to the Place de la Calende and
the Eau de Robec, while the fourth side was marked by the waters of
the Robec itself.
This was the Rouen which welcomed Charlemagne in 769, who came to
celebrate Easter in the Cathedral he was to benefit so largely, among
the canons who had only been organised into a regular chapter, living
in one community, about nine years before. The great Emperor not only
helped the Cathedral in his lifetime, but left it a legacy in his
will, for the town, in gratitude for his benefactions, had furnished
twenty-eight "ships" to help him pursue his enemies, out of the fleet
which had already begun to exploit the rich commercial possibilities
of Britain, and to enter into trading engagements even with the
Byzantine emperors. With the second coming of Charlemagne at the dawn
of the ninth century, the next period in the history of Rouen closes.
At his death the semblance of an empire, into which his mighty
personality had welded the warring anarchies of Western Europe,
crumbled back into its constituent fragments. His was an empire wholly
aristocratic, and wholly German. After Charles Martel had driven out
the Saracens from Tours and Poitiers, it absorbed Gaul also in its
rule, but Charlemagne was never other than a Teutonic ruler over
Franks. He was one of the makers of Europe but not one of the creators
of the Kingdom of France. It was not until his empire crumbled at his
death that those persistent entities, France and Germany, made their
appearance.
But Normandy had much to go through before she became a part of that
kingdom which she did so much to make. In 556 a great fire had
destroyed most of the city of Rouen. Thirty years later a plague had
decimated her inhabitants. The Merovingians had left her ruined and
depopulated. Though spasmodic efforts at prosperity and strength
appeared during the great Emperor's lifetime, the town had not yet
reached anything approaching to a solid basis of civic or commercial
power. Its attempts were ruined by the anarchy that followed
Charlemagne's decease, and there was little left for the first Danes
to plunder when the first galleys of the Northern pirates swept up the
Seine in 841.
[Illustration]